I didn’t plan to lose my father. I didn’t plan to lose my roommate. I should have been more grown-up at age twenty-one but I wasn’t. In fact, I was pretty immature. I knew something vaguely about death but I was too young and too into myself to see anything beyond my little space in the world.

Everything fell apart. My father, of blessed memory, who had always been a very healthy person, took an almost life-long risk smoking several packs of cigarettes each day, probably since adolescence. The nicotine addiction made his craving for more and more cigarettes constant. Even when he was diagnosed with lung cancer he still smoked. First he was mis-diagnosed as having had a stroke because he had many neurological symptoms, but later the tiny minuscule tumor on his lung was found. It was lung cancer. The tumor had metastasized to his brain. It was inoperable, he would not have survived the operation, that was the medical opinion in 1963 by Dr. Masserlink at the Neurological Institute at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, a premier hospital. In the meantime he was given cobalt radiation treatment hoping to keep him alive for however long he could sustain life. There was no chemotherapy then. All options closed. The gates of life were shutting down. Life was evaporating. Quickly. The bottom line, he would die.

At twenty-one I could barely fathom what was going on. It was always my mother, from the time I was ten years old when she had her first heart attack, who would be the first to die. I feared this from as far back as I can remember. Never my father. But my father who never had a sick day in this life, who went to work every day, who never complained, he was dying? I couldn’t imagine dad dying. After all he was only fifty-five when he was diagnosed. Here I was a young adult college student clueless of the reality at hand. My father was dying. All I could do was deny the obvious. Instead of visiting him at the nursing home regularly where he spent his last months of life because he was incontinent, I avoided seeing him as much as possible. And when I saw him, he wasn’t my father. Instead he was a strange skinny sickly ghost-like-man, staring somewhere, sitting in a reclining dark brown vinyl chair in his small, bleak dark room. One window here where sunlight barely entered, just a twin bed, no bedspread, a small dresser, and a TV. That was it. A lit-up cigarette was in his mouth. This was the father who helped raise me? He was dead-in-life. Life was losing, death was encroaching.

And then there was another interruption in my already turned-upside-down-world. Risa, of blessed memory, my very dear college friend, was diagnosed with lymphosarcoma, cancer of the lymph system. She told me to pray for her. I didn’t quite get it...until I did. She was dying. I was at her funeral and burial. Good-bye, Risa, I uttered to myself. About eighteen months later I put a shovel-full of dirt over my father’s grave as did the others in our immediate family. Good-bye, Dad, I uttered to myself.

Their deaths re-shaped my life. I couldn’t get away with being young and naive anymore. I couldn’t avoid facing death’s reality. It is a part of life’s cycle for all of us. Mine, too.